The House Grew More Alive

Once the children were in the house the air became more vivid and more heated;

every object in the house grew more alive.

(Mary Gordon)

I’ve been thinking about Empty-nest syndrome a lot lately, even though my youngest child is only eight. This fall, I’ve watched friends return from dropping children off at college. I’ve seen how the repercussions of those goodbyes quiver through their lives.


A few seem almost giddily excited to have more time with their husbands. They are taking a fresh look at their own interests, attending graduate school, or just moving room by room through their houses, finally organizing the closets and putting those pictures into albums.


Others are not so sanguine. They admit that now that the dust of a bustling family life has settled, they look across the table at their husbands and feel a lump of disappointment and loneliness throb in their chests.


This past summer, I talked about mid-life with a few women who are approaching sixty. They are smart and accomplished, and the jarring experience of finding their children grown and gone is in the rearview mirror for them.


One of them is Dale Hansen Bourke, whom I had the privilege to interview for her.meneutics, a blog published by Christianity Today magazine. When she was describing what “Empty-nest syndrome” felt like to her, I sat up and took note.


“There is a point in life when we say, ‘Wait, a minute ago I had my children here. I was making their lunches and being their mom and suddenly, they’ve left. They’re gone.’ It hits you hard,” she said. She went on. “It’s amazing how you go through the first half of your life so busy with your kids and then — it’s all gone. All the things you felt you were good at don’t matter anymore.”


I read the Mary Gordon quote, see the little foam Nerf bullets scattered under my piano bench, find a candy wrapper on the arm of the sofa, put my phone down on a sticky patch of drying, spilled juice on the kitchen counter. 


Sure, it’s messy sometimes, this life. It’s noisy. There’s brittle arguing when the little sister insists on singing the same two lines from her favorite song at full voice while the older brother sits at the computer with the periodic table of the elements in front of him, trying to figure out something about numbers of ions.


“Mom!”


It's more heated with them here. And more alive. And someday, I’ll be on the other side of this time.


And I’m glad that I've been able to savor it, at least most of the time.